For several early years search was thought to have no great business model (banner ads and similar). And then it did.

GoTo.com -> Google -> $$$

These exact words were said tens of thousands of times about Facebook (am old enough to remember those discussions :) ), “no way they can monetize on mobile” (this was the most fun).

rules are simple, if you have Xbn or XXXm users on your system, you will make big bank in ads eventually

It's tempting to look at trends and assume there must be a rule behind them, but it's also intellectually lazy. Please do the hard work of justifying your stance like GGP did.

it is a simple stance - if you have a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people ad monetization strategy will be found cause there are people a lot smarter than you and me that will get it done. here’s intellectual challenge - find a business with comparable number of users to openai which is not swimming in ad revenue - one will do

A counterpoint is that there are many products with significant usage that fail or never attempt advertising monetization. They just increase the cost of the product.

Such as?

I apologize, but I thought it was self-evident. The majority of enterprise professional software.

I would argue that comparing OpenAI to social media companies is an awful comparison. A much better comparison would be to Microsoft Office.

I thought we were talking about search or social media companies failing to capitalize on advertising which I haven't seen. OpenAI is much closer to Google than it is to Office.

I could see that argument, but the economics of the two are so different. I just don't see how using an LLM can be sustainable for search, but could see it as an enterprise model.

What do you mean not sustainable for search? OpenAI is eating Google's lunch forcing them to put in LLMs on Google. I personally don't use traditional search anymore, it's all through LLMs. Meanwhile everyone hates Microsoft Office LLMs.

Snapchat

Total Quarterly Revenue (Q4 2024): $1.55 billion in total revenue, with $1.41 billion coming from advertising

Basically all their revenue is ad revenue and not too bad

At that time, Facebook provided a free service without any real competitors. The masses will switch to Meta AI or Gemini or Claude at the drop of an ad that annoys them enough.

Gemini, GPT and Claude will all have ads on the consumer side. They will go together in quasi lock-step into the ad future, because that money is gigantic and they're going to need it.

The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.

With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.

amazing this is even a debate, we have now decades of this across everything that reaches enough users, it is a certainty as much that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. as probably many people here on HN I am designated computer-fixer for all my family so any family gathering I have to look at someone's computer about something. years ago I started checking whether browser(s) anything ad-blocking in place and I am 0 for million by now. while HN crowd might be theoretically pushing back on ads (even with like "I won't use this if there are ads" nonsense) general public is so used to ads that I sometimes feel it is welcomed change when some new service etc gets ads. I remember the first time I saw an ad on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter and I were like "no f'ing way!!!" and my wife was like "oh, ____ is on sale this weekend, cool!" :)